“How do we build what’s next while delivering what matters now?”
Your best people are delivering this year’s numbers. Nobody is placing the bets for the next five years.
An innovation engine beside yours.
Talk it over
Ideas keep getting shelved
How this problem shows up
- The product roadmap ends a few releases out, but nobody owns the longer-range opportunity set.
- Innovation ideas depend on who can win budget in a given quarter.
- Promising concepts repeatedly get shelved when operating priorities tighten.
- There is no repeatable way to compare one new bet with another.
- The same internal teams are expected to hit current commitments and test future opportunities.
- Competitors, startups, customers, or new technologies are moving into areas you expected to own.
- Leadership discusses disruption often but has few validated options ready to act on.
- Pipeline of future revenue opportunities
- Percentage of growth dependent on current products
- Time from idea to tested concept
- Capital committed before validation
- Number of strategic options available when the market changes
- Ability to respond to disruption
- Ability to commercialize internal ideas
- Innovation spending that never reaches a go / no-go decision
The risk is not that every new idea fails. The risk is reaching a market shift with no tested options because this year’s priorities consumed all of the company’s attention.
“We don’t feel like we can wait for the clients to come to us… when we already know what needs to be done.”
Executive, pharmacy benefit services company
Invest like a PE firm, inside the company
A roadmap someone owns
Your CPO and head of strategy own a five-year roadmap that ties every bet to where the company is going, at corporate and in each division.
Fund bets like a VC
A ring-fenced fund, kept out of the annual budget and released by milestones. Each bet passes a go or no-go gate before the next check.
Bring the disruption inside
AI is already reshaping markets, and it is just getting started. Put it in your portfolio now, alongside the competitors, startups, and technologies worth watching, before you have to decide how far to take it.
You can’t predict the threat that shows up overnight. You can have options ready when it does.
The frameworks behind it
Zone to Win · Geoffrey Moore
Each part of the company needs its own rules. New bets live in the Incubation Zone: a ring-fenced fund, released by milestones, measured on progress instead of this year’s numbers. When a bet is big enough to change the company, the CEO leads the transformation.
Open Innovation · Henry Chesbrough
Useful knowledge is spread well beyond your walls. Bring outside ideas in, and take your own ideas to market through licensing, partners, and spin-offs when your business model can’t.
Two ways to start
Plan first to choose the bet worth making. Start building when a bet is ready to test with real users.
Blueprint
Research with the people who decide, the architecture, and a development plan with milestones and a budget you can fund. Two or four weeks.
Build with Us
A solution architect who builds, on your first piece of work, alongside the person who owns the problem. Two weeks to start, then month to month.
Not sure which fits? Call us to talk it over.
Running several bets at once, year after year? The Lab →
Work like this
Questions buyers ask
How should a company decide which innovation bets to keep funding?
Fund each bet the way a venture investor would: a set amount from a ring-fenced fund, a milestone, and a go or no-go before the next check. Start with the core of the value, not the full feature list. If the core doesn’t hold, shut the bet down and move the money to the next one.
How The Lab runs a portfolio of bets →
Should we build an internal innovation team or use an outside R&D partner?
Most companies have no R&D group, and the teams they do have are committed to this year’s numbers. A partner gives you a working team beside yours now, and the code, research, and data models stay yours. When you want to bring the work in-house, we help you hire and build your own team as part of the transfer.
See an embedded R&D partnership →
What does an innovation partner deliver: a strategy deck or working software?
Working software. An early-stage bet is scoped to the one thing that has to be true, not a finished product, and you agree up front where that line sits. Every stage leaves you something you keep and use: code, designs, research, and data models, with no licensing fees.
Find out whether it can be done in two weeks →
How much of our own team’s time does an outside innovation team need?
Your core team stays on this year’s plan. The time we ask for comes from your subject-matter experts, who join a bet when it needs what they know, with a C-suite sponsor signing off. Budget for that time: the experts drive the key calls, and nobody outside your company can replace what they know.
How The Lab works with your experts →Tell us where the company needs to be in five years
Thirty minutes. Walk us through the bets you’re weighing and the threats you’re watching, and we will tell you how we would run them as a portfolio.
The problems clients hire us for most
New Product
“We have a product opportunity, but not the team to build it.”
Explore New Product →
Prototype to Production
“Our prototype works. Now it has to hold up in production.”
Explore Prototype to Production →
Platform Modernization
“Our business has outgrown our platform.”
Explore Platform Modernization →
Or see every problem we hear.